Baker & Daniels has represented aerospace manufacturers, aircraft owners, aircraft operators and carriers in a wide variety of aviation litigation. We believe that our deep and broad business litigation expertise often gives us an advantage when litigating the many – and often dispositive – business and commercial aspects of aviation cases. Even accident cases often turn on contract regulatory or statutory issues on which we have years of experience.
Recent aviation cases by Baker & Daniels lawyers include:
- Litigation as co-counsel, through jury trial and the appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court, of breaches and failures to disclose superior knowledge between a large government aerospace contractor and its subcontractor.
- Defense of the operator and owner of an aircraft against the claims brought by the family of a deceased employee asserting a $200 million wrongful death claim arising from an accident, including extensive foreign discovery.
- Multiple ongoing representations of a large aerospace contractor defending federal court litigation with a customer on terms of a fleet-wide engine maintenance agreement.
- Representation of an aircraft owner against an insurance carrier on coverage for a crash in South America.
- Representation of a large Part 121 carrier in a Chapter 11 case and related litigation.
Our lead aviation litigator, partner Jay Yeager, is an instrument-rated commercial pilot. Partners Steve Claffey and Jim Carr were lead counsel for ATA Airlines in its recent Chapter 11 case in Indianapolis. ATA was the 10th largest U.S. air carrier at the time of its filing, and resolution of the bankruptcy case involved required resolution or litigation of dozens of aviation-related business issues, including parsing complex commercial aircraft leases.